We’ve only just stopped talking about the success of EL James’s erotic Fifty Shades trilogy. Still, it seems the pace of the “pornification” of pop culture has stepped up a notch.
“Pornography manifests in movies, TV, music videos, fashion – it’s everywhere,” says advertising consultant Cindy Gallop. “Nobody quite knows how all this is going to play out because it’s never happened in the history of humanity. There is a lack of open, healthy dialogue on porn in our society.”
Gallop’s frustration with what she sees as our refusal to address the “creeping ubiquity of hard-core pornography” drove her to create a website called Make Love Not Porn.
The site was born out of personal experience because Gallop, a 52-year-old former executive, has spent the past decade recreationally dating a lot of different men in their twenties.
So she is well placed to witness the impact the pornography binge is having on our youth.
What Gallop started to notice is that the men she was having sex with were learning everything they did by watching porn.
“Almost all mainstream porn is made by men for men,” she says. “The entire raison d’être of these sex scenes is to get the man off. As a result, an entire generation is growing up believing that is the be-all-and-end-all of sex.
“Pornography does not teach women to expect their own pleasure, or ask for their own pleasure, and it certainly doesn’t show them how to achieve their own pleasure.”
Jessica Coen, editor of sex and fashion website Jezebel, agrees: “It has become increasingly common for young men to request things during sex that they have learnt from porn – this wasn’t happening before porn became so widely available.
“We have to teach young men how to temper their expectations, how to treat women properly and that there is a big gap between porn and reality.”
It used to be that porn existed in the sticky pages of a nudie magazine. But now, in our post-internet culture, we live in a world where porn stars make the crossover into the mainstream and fledgling actresses further their careers by getting their tits out in FHM.
Take the career of Sasha Grey as an example. Once the proud recipient of “best three-way sex scene” at the Adult Movie Awards, she has now acted in a Steven Soderbergh film and the TV series Entourage.
There has long been a blurring of boundaries in the fashion industry, too. Iconic fashion designer Marc Jacobs recently showed off his Brazilian porn actor boyfriend Harry Louis on the beach in Rio; Calvin Klein had one, too – 22-year-old Nick Gruber, who was arrested recently for possession of cocaine.
As we all know, sex sells. Globally, the sex toy industry is valued at $15 billion (R125bn). So it’s not surprising that American Apparel, the supplier of cotton clothing to an unashamedly youthful market, regularly uses porn actors in its ad campaigns.
But it is because of these blurred boundaries that confusion arises. American Apparel founder Dov Charney has found himself on the receiving end of several lawsuits for sexual harassment.
One of fashion’s most in-demand photographers, Terry Richardson, meanwhile, has mixed things up on set to such an extent that he has been accused of inappropriate behaviour.
“I think the Terry Richardson-style shoot – that kind of seedy back-alley thing that he does – is everywhere right now,” says Coen.
“The images are very suggestive and the models get younger and younger, and the female form gets taller and lankier and further away from what you would associate with traditional womanhood. But is that because of the porn industry or the fashion industry? It’s a can of worms.”
These days, a glance at any rack of fashion magazines shows that a whole new genre seems to have sprung up which sits somewhere between i-D, Vogue and the top shelf.
There’s Lovecat, which takes the “sexy pin-up” approach and features hot new models in various states of undress.
There’s also Treats! magazine, a coffee-table tome which retails at $20, now on its third issue. It was created by the US-based, Cheshire-born photographer Steve Shaw and is due to launch next month.
Treats! has been called porn chic, high-end erotica and compared to Playboy at the height of its game in the 1970s.
“I think people have been subjected to FHM, Maxim and other lads’ mags far too long. Having to look at some girl in a horribly naff bikini is not where it’s at. People want something different now.”
But there is an important issue we need to address here. With porn being just one or two clicks away, this means that our children’s introduction to porn comes before they have even reached their teens.
“A study done a few years ago showed the average age at which kids first view hard-core porn on line was 11,” says Gallop.
“That age is now eight. This isn’t because eight-year-olds go looking for it; it’s because someone shows them on a phone in the playground or when they go round to a friend’s house.”
And Gallop has seen first-hand what too much porn can do. “When you are watching, say, five or six hours a day and you are masturbating ferociously, you can become sensitised to the way you handle yourself,” she says.
“I dated one guy who had begun watching porn at the age of 12 and had lost his virginity at the age of 18. So for six years he’d been watching vast amounts of porn. He’s now 23 and there is nothing any real-life woman can do for him. It’s called idiosyncratic masturbatory syndrome.”
But, she points out, such cases are few and far between, and the main problem is that we may be producing a generation whose sex education is composed solely of viewing pornography.
Justin Hancock is the creator of Bish UK, a sex-education programme for teens that is realistic about their exposure to pornography.
“We need to provide kids with a sex education so that when they do come across porn they are educated enough to be able to see it in context and see it’s not real,” he says. “But young people are more nuanced and intelligent about the internet and porn than we give them credit for.”
Recently there has been a shift towards a somewhat less hysterical view of all this. Dr Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle de Jour, has a book just out called The Sex Myth, which questions this so-called epidemic of sex addiction and the sexualisation of our youth.
And the 29-year-old Australian writer Rachel Hills has just spent three years travelling to three continents, interviewing more than 150 young people to see how realistic our current views of sex are.
“I started the book because I became frustrated by media portrayals of contemporary sexual cultures,” says Hills. “A compulsory sexual activity seemed to be imposed on us – that we all have to be interested in it, we all have to be doing it and skilled at it. Well, as a younger person, it certainly didn’t apply to my life, or my friends’, and once I started doing interviews I realised it didn’t apply to many of their lives either.
“Just as there was a fear of TV, and a fear of computer games, now we have a fear of the internet and the pornography it offers,” says Hancock. “The main problem with the porn debate is the media wanting to present it in binary terms, about porn being either harmful or not, and that’s created a bit of a moral panic. But we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. It’s way more complicated than that.” – The Independent